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Campus Safety officers honored as life savers

Last September, Campus Safety Lt. Ben Mosley ’07 had come in on his day off to look at the schedule when a man ran into the office screaming, “Man down! Man down!”

Mosley and Corporal Zach Barker ’11 looked out to the tennis courts to see Jack Davis motionless on the ground.

While Barker dialed 911, Mosley grabbed a portable defibrillator and strapped it to Davis’ chest.

The device analyzed Davis’ pulse and came back with the reading: “shock advised.”

“We looked at each other and said ‘Guess we’re shocking him,’ ” Barker said. Mosley deployed the defibrillator.

It worked, reestablishing a regular heartbeat and a second shock was not advised.

Barker then rounded up four C of I students to help funnel the dispatched ambulance back to the tennis courts.

“That’s one of the great things about working at The College of Idaho,” Barker said. “I don’t know of a lot of places where you can just tell four students to go do something and their response is ‘Got it.’”

Canyon County Paramedics soon arrived and took Davis to West Valley Medical Center. He had a triple bypass and almost a year later he is still alive and in good health.

Last month, Barker, Mosley and the paramedics who arrived on the scene that day received the Life Saving Award from the Canyon County Ambulance District. At the ceremony, all were reminded that their quick reactions saved Davis’ life.

“Everything lined up properly to save this man’s life,” Canyon County Paramedics Director Robb Hickey told the audience. “Studies have found the faster that you can apply electrical current to the heart, the better the chances are for survival and [Davis] is a prime example of that. Here we are almost a year later and that success is measurable.”

Even so, the Campus Safety officers don’t think of themselves as heroes—they were simply doing their job.

“That’s not really what it was,” Mosley said about the hero label. “We were just doing what we were trained to do. It’s humbling.”

“It honestly boils down to this: we put two stickers on him and pushed a button,” Barker added. “It’s a big deal in the outcome, but anyone could have done it.”

Founded in 1891, The College of Idaho is the state’s oldest private liberal arts college. It has a century-old tradition of educating some of the most accomplished graduates in Idaho, including seven Rhodes Scholars, three Marshall Scholars, and another 12 Truman and Goldwater Scholars. The College is located on a beautiful campus in Caldwell, Idaho. Its distinctive PEAK curriculum challenges students to attain competencies in the four knowledge peaks of the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences and a professional field, enabling them to graduate with an academic major and three minors in four years. For more information on The College of Idaho, visit www.collegeofidaho.edu.